A Poet of Piercing Valentines

It isn’t merely love that’s blind. The love poet, too, can be heard stumbling and blundering about, sightless and ecstatic, as another Valentine’s Day dawns.

Robert Graves—these days, perhaps best known in the States for the novel “I, Claudius” but for me England’s premier twentieth-century love poet—is a case in point. Graves was typically a cool-eyed self-appraiser, but quite unreliable when love was his topic. In 1969, the year he turned seventy-four, Graves published a compilation, drawn from his earlier volumes, called “Poems About Love.” Some of these are beautiful and heartbreaking, others are reportorial and uninspiring, and I’m not sure he could tell the difference. He left out some jewels, and included some mushy mash-notes. A lovable lover, it seems that the very subject of love was so galvanic, so consuming, that he couldn’t make discriminations within it.

Of course, the competition among love poets was a bit sparse in the twentieth century; Graves would have had a harder time excelling had he been born with the Romantics of the nineteenth century, or the Elizabethans of the seventeenth. As it was, many of his most accomplished contemporaries hardly gave love a glance—in their work, anyway. You could print the “Collected Love Lyrics of Marianne Moore” on a sheet the size of your average parking ticket, and you wouldn’t need much more paper if you chose to make it a twofer, and include Ezra Pound. I do think that E. E. Cummings gives Graves a serious challenge, though I know that many sound people dismiss Cummings’s love poetry outright, as self-congratulatory and goopy. (Actually, any sound person must dismiss much of his love poetry as self-congratulatory and goopy.)

If the love poets of the twentieth century left a vacuum, critics have rushed in to fill it. Poems are deemed love poems not so much for what they say as for when they said it—the conditions underlying the poem’s creation. Elizabeth Bishop’s superb “A Cold Spring” is a prime example. I’ve seen it referred to as a love poem, though the “you” in the poem is not an obvious inamorata but the owner of the poem’s setting, the Maryland farm from which Bishop observes the natural world with such tender exactitude. Some of Bishop’s critics have seen the poem’s unfolding warmth as erotic—a celebration of her lesbianism—and, certainly, the poem’s gorgeous imagery (fireflies ascending like champagne bubbles) might herald the elongating outlook of someone newly in love. Or it might not. The poet’s epigram (“Nothing is so beautiful as spring”) comes from Gerard Manley Hopkins, who found ecstasies in God’s creation independent of carnal appetite. In any event, Bishop’s sentiments are far removed from conventional notions of the love poet as someone who, ostentatiously throwing caution to the wind, like Graves, cries his passion to the moon and stars.

Graves’s best-known love poem—perhaps his best-known poem—is the miniature “Love Without Hope.” A miracle of concision, it manages in four lines to encapsulate much of Graves’s imprudent magnificence, his outsize, foolish gallantry:

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcherSwept off his tall hat to the Squire’s own daughter,So let the imprisoned larks escape and flySinging about her head, as she rode by.

Our young bird-catcher forfeits his livelihood—those larks intended for someone else’s dinner—for a fleeting tributary display. Normally, the sweeping off of a tall hat would suggest elegance, but not here. (We know what the top of his head must look like.) Still, though we meet him in a single quatrain, we’re confident he’ll never regret his sacrifice. Instinctively, mutely, he does what love poets reliably do: he brings uplifted voices, the gift of music, to his beloved.

The poem embodies its own action: as it progresses, it breaks into song. The meter isn’t obvious in those first two lines, and their rhyme isn’t off so much as off-off. But the final line is sturdy iambic pentameter, and the final rhyme is clean. (The poem is a potent demonstration of the indispensability of off-rhyme. Most of its movement would be lost if those first two lines rhymed neatly.) The bird-catcher may be a country bumpkin, and the Squire’s daughter (note the capital S) destined to recline on satin, but the knowing reader discerns that his beauty ultimately outdistances hers. It’s the recurring paradox of so much love poetry: the prostrate idolizer eventually outshines his idol.

Unlike Cummings, who revelled in love’s graphic pungency (“i like,slowly stroking the,shocking fuzz / of your electric fur”), Graves was largely circumspect about the mechanics of passion. (“Down, wanton, down,” was about as far as he went in that direction.) But his love poems belong to the bedroom, and are often clearly spoken between bedmates. Sometimes there’s a touch of sadness, hints of post coitum omne animal triste est. But other poems—perhaps Graves’s greatest triumph as a love poet—seem to ascend from lovemaking into a wiser, profounder love: “A Lost World,” “She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep,” “Counting the Beats.”

The spare, even denuded initial stanza of “Counting the Beats” is a puzzle in all sorts of ways, not least prosodically (is Graves really going to end each line of every stanza with an identical sound?):

You, love, and I,(He whispers), you and I,And if no more than you and IWhat care you and I?

The second stanza clarifies his architectural plan (first three lines terminating in the same word, and concluding line a rhyme on “I”), as well as some of his thematic aims (the tension between the lovers’ timeless interlude and the workaday world’s unforgiving, clocked realities):

Counting the beats,Counting the slow heart beats,The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,Wakeful they lie.

Outdoors, there builds a raging storm that will “burst upon their heads one day / From a bitter sky.” Indoors, there builds the question of whether love means anything in the face of mortal adversity.

And if Graves gives the clamorous workaday world the final word (the last line is a repetition of “Wakeful they lie”), the poem’s tolling heart is the penultimate stanza, in which the male lover answers the female’s question about where they will be after “death strikes home”:

Not there but here,(He whispers) only here,As we are, here, together, now and here,Always you and I.

There’s a breath of bravado to this—as well as a touching, servile willingness to swear allegiance to the banner inscribed “LOVE CONQUERS ALL.”

This curious blend—Graves the Conqueror and Graves the Conquered, the kingly lover and the lowly menial—animates and brightens one of his most unlikely triumphs, “The Frog and the Golden Ball.” It’s a poem seemingly doomed to mediocrity: a simple retelling, in old-fashioned quatrains, of the fairy tale of the prince imprisoned in the guise of a frog. Yet it beguiles from the opening stanza:

She let her golden ball fall down the wellAnd begged a cold frog to retrieve it;For which she kissed his ugly, gaping mouth—Indeed he could scarce believe it.

Of course, the kiss transforms the awestruck frog into a prince. And the princess swoons with devotion. Still, she has the presence of mind to note the daunting obstructions to the course of true love. She is already pledged to her cousin, to a marriage designed to secure alliances between bordering kingdoms. Her pragmatic, domineering parents will never consent to her marrying anyone else.

Yet her lover is unfazed by this news. This prince who remains a frog—for he recalls the ghastly, slimed shape that only recently enclosed him, and understands the unreckonable source that has worked his brave metamorphosis—offers his skittish would-be bride the perfect reassurance, again phrased with the quietness of one of Graves’s masterly off-rhymes:

“What then shall we do now?” she asked her lover.He kissed her again and said:“Is magic of love less powerful at your CourtThan at this green well-head?”

It seems fair to say that, temperamentally, Graves couldn’t fall in love with a woman. He fell, each time, for an immortal—a goddess, a muse, a revenant, a moonling. As a classical scholar and translator of Homer, Graves understood that romances between man and immortal have always seen a rough passage, going back to Odysseus and Circe. But, over the years, one goddess after another beckoned to Graves, and who was he—mere mortal—to refuse them?

Graves was also an ex-soldier, and he documented his catastrophic experiences in the First World War in his celebrated memoir, “Goodbye to All That.” At the Battle of the Somme, where a shell fragment pierced his lung, he was officially reported dead. This was an experience that would be frequently repeated—or that he would repeat—in that other war, the one between men and women. In every romance, the time would come when he’d be abandoned or—much the same thing—the enchantment would fade, and he would undergo another near-death experience. His last decades are a little painful to contemplate. Graves did not follow the temperate advice he offered his fictitious military man in “Advice to Colonel Valentine”:

Friend, honor your gray hairs, keep out of fashion—Even if a foolish girl, not yet full grown,Confronts you with a scarcely decent passion.

He anointed as Muse one young woman after another, even as a concerned friend was counselling him to get a better fitting set of dentures before setting out on his next lecture tour.

To assess Graves’s over-all accomplishment is a formidable undertaking, given both his prolificacy (more than a hundred books) and the breadth of his erudition (deep linguistic and historical research into a host of cultures, modern and ancient). He saw himself, ultimately, as a bold investigator into the origins of creativity, the riddles of the psyche. Some of his pronouncements seem profound (“Fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully denies fact cannot achieve truth”), and others merely puzzling (“Love poems must be bounced back off a moon”), and still others inane (as when he ascribed a perceived prevalence of male homosexuality in America to the practice of drinking milk shakes).

But whatever our uncertainties about where finally to place him as thinker and writer, there’s no doubting his validity as a love poet. As an exultant Romeo, he could crow with the best of them. But he was even better, I think, when he spoke low—in a whisper that echoes, its flawless syllables intact, down through the decades since its first utterance and into a new century.

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